A uranium mining proposal threatens water supplieshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/a-uranium-mining-proposal-is-larded-with-snake-oil
This South Dakota project claims technology will trump nature.I step into an elevator and push the button; the car descends the equivalent of 23 stories in 30 seconds. When survey team members and I step out, we enter Jewel Cave, the third-longest cave in the world.

Since 2005, I’ve helped to survey unmapped areas of this subterranean labyrinth on the edge of South Dakota’s Black Hills. The experience has taught me a lot about what lies beneath the earth’s surface.

Solid as a rock -- that’s how most of us think of our planet. But my underground exploration has shown me that the earth is anything but solid. It’s almost impossible, for instance, to predict what a cave passage will or will not connect to deep underground.

That’s one reason why the British Columbia-based Powertech Corp. proposal for an in-situ uranium mine in southwestern South Dakota is a bad idea. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of the mining process. In-situ is Latin for in-place, so the uranium is “mined” where it is found, underground. Powertech plans to drill into the uranium-bearing rock, then pump in fluids that cause the uranium to bind with the liquid.

That liquid, composed mostly of water, moves through the pervious rock layer. Additional wells would be placed in the direction that the liquid is expected to travel, and the liquid, now carrying uranium, gets pumped out. The uranium is then extracted from the liquid and turned into yellowcake, which is later refined.

Exposure to radioactive uranium, of course, is not good for human health. Conventional mining leaves behind piles of radioactive waste rock. Open-pit mining stirs up radioactive dust, which can travel great distances in the wind.

Powertech project manager Mark Hollenbeck, a chemical engineer and a local rancher, claims in-situ mining is safer and more environmentally friendly than conventional mining. He calls it “arthroscopic.” One could argue that keeping the rock and dust underground is safer.

But there are potential problems underground. The water that’s pumped below comes from local aquifers. Powertech’s permit calls for taking 3 million gallons of water every day from this semi-arid area, which has recurring cycles of drought.

After the uranium has been removed from the liquid, the excess, which now contains toxic heavy metals and radiation, is pumped back into the ground or sprayed on the surface. “This is a form of mining that always contaminates and it’s done right in the water supply,” says environmental attorney Bruce Ellison of Rapid City, S.D.

Of course, the mining company says that the layers of rock above and below the uranium-bearing strata are impervious, as dense as if they formed a triple-sealed, underground storage tank. How could anything leak out of solid rock?

Then I think of Jewel Cave and its 166 miles of passages snaking underneath only six square miles of land, and the memory shoots holes through the “solid rock” idea. It makes me wonder how Powertech can claim that radioactive liquids won’t get into the aquifers where drinking water comes from.

I’m well aware that different strata of rock have different characteristics and that some are denser than others. But even if a rock layer has been virtually impenetrable in the past, there is no guarantee that it will continue to be so in the future.

Our planet is neither solid nor is its current form permanent. It’s in a constant state of flux. It is subject to internal and external forces. Groundwater and gravity team up to exploit and penetrate the tiniest crack or weakness in an “impenetrable” rock layer. The wells that Powertech drills will also connect previously separated layers of rock, providing a way for radioactive water to get where it’s not supposed to go. The history of in-situ uranium mines in Wyoming, Nebraska and Texas shows that this is exactly what happens.

The problem is that humans looking to turn a profit make ridiculous promises that distort or ignore science, history and common sense. Remember the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that British Petroleum claimed could not fail, or the West, Texas, fertilizer plant that couldn’t explode, or the earthquake-proof Fukushima nuclear power plant that continues to spew radioactivity today?

When dealing with the forces of nature, there are no 100 percent ironclad guarantees. Anyone who offers such rock solid assurances is merely peddling snake oil and should not be trusted.

Ken Steinken is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He writes about nature and the environment in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Editor's note: do to an editing error, a subtitle that appeared with the original online version of this story was inaccurate and has been changed.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryWriters on the Range2013/11/05 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleChain stores discount a town’s true
worthhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/15068
The writer drives from Rapid City, S.D., to visit Glasgow,
Mont., and at first finds himself at a loss for words to describe a
small town Glasgow, Mont., is a far cry
and a long drive from the mountainous western portion of a state
that draws its name from the Spanish word
montana. I know that because I recently drove to
Glasgow, a town of 3,253 that rests in a flat region of
northeastern Montana and serves as the county seat of the aptly
named Valley County.

My wife and I visited Glasgow
shortly after our 23-year-old daughter moved there to spend a year
working as an Americorps volunteer at the Women’s Resource
Center. Since no interstates go north there, we drove on two-lane
highways for all but 55 miles of the 440-mile trip from our home in
Rapid City, S.D. For the last 400 miles of the journey, no vehicle
showed up in the rearview mirror — not even one — even
on the 25 miles of interstate in Montana.

Our daughter
had called us a couple of days after arriving in town to prepare us
for where she’d landed. "They have a McDonald’s, a
Dairy Queen and an Albertsons grocery store," she explained, "but
no Wal-Mart. It’s 200 miles to the nearest K-Mart. But they
do have a Pamida."

That’s how many of us who live
in rural areas characterize a town and maybe even judge its worth.
We tote up the chains that have located there. I now think this
tells us next to nothing, because it merely tells how a place is
just like any other place scattered around the country. It
doesn’t tell us what makes a town unique or odd or beautiful.

Before we visited Glasgow, my folks called from their
home in suburban Chicago, where I grew up. (My hometown happens to
be home of the first McDonald’s drive-in.) They asked for
news of their granddaughter’s move and new location.

I tried not to say it, but I ended up repeating, "They
even have a McDonald’s." Then I went on to list the other
chains that were there. I felt terrible, but I really didn’t
know what else to say. The statements served as a kind of cultural
shorthand.

Even in the rural reaches of our country, the
world of advertising and the corporations have so saturated our
minds with their products and logos that we find it difficult to
define our existence apart from them. It takes effort to see a
place and the people who have settled there for who they are in
their own frame of reference. But to do otherwise is to show a form
of bias that writer Wendell Berry calls a "prejudice against
country people."

Now that I’ve visited Glasgow
myself, I’ve discovered several ways to describe where my
daughter lives. I talk about the town’s remoteness and its
broad valley, and I sometimes say that St. Matthew’s, the
Episcopal Church which my daughter attends, is full of "Markles."
That’s the name of a family that’s been in the area for
generations and which owns, among other things, a furniture store
called Markles. It is celebrating its 100th year of business.

I make sure they know that the priest at St.
Matthew’s is also an orthopedic surgeon at the local
hospital. He decided he wanted to go into the ministry and now does
both jobs — not an unusual phenomenon in small towns.

They might also want to know that the chief of police
called the Women’s Resource Center where my daughter works to
say someone had reported a vehicle with South Dakota plates
regularly parked there, and to inform that owner that state law
requires new residents to get Montana plates within 30 days of
moving to the state. And I pass on the tip my daughter received
from a member of St. Matthew’s to check out the huge portions
of the walleye special served on Fridays at Sam’s Supper
Club.

As corporate America spreads like creeping jenny to
choke out the character of rural America, it is up to us to remain
alert to what lies beneath the chain-store veneer of the places we
live. We need to resist the siren’s call, amplified by
advertising and designed to lure us to the chains that promise us
rock-bottom prices, in place of personal concern and lasting
relationships. We can seek out and support the things that make a
place distinctively local. I did, and I can tell you, the walleye
was phenomenal.

Ken Steinken is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He teaches journalism and English at
Stevens High School in Rapid City, South
Dakota.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssaysArticleA railroad through Wyoming and South Dakota grasslands is
a stab to the hearthttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/13500

Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern Railroad plans to
build a 260-mile line through Buffalo Gap National Grassland in
South Dakota and Thunder Basin National Grassland in Wyoming. The
line would connect to the railroad's existing track to create a
900-mile network designed to haul low-sulfur coal out of the Powder
River Basin in Wyoming. I wish I could do something to protect
these grasslands, to help people understand they are treasures more
scarce here than forests or mountains.

But how
do you save a grassland? What do you say to help people understand
it needs to be preserved? A grassland doesn't help. It doesn't do
itself any favors by what it is.

A grassland is
subtle; not like the Grand Canyon that threatens to devour you if
you fail to give it the honor it is due. Nor is it like Devil's
Tower, which suddenly erupts out of the prairie and then mesmerizes
you as you draw close to it. It's nothing like the boiling mud
pots, geysers and mineral terraces of Yellowstone that make you
wonder what planet you accidentally landed on.

Think of this grassland as open. To some, that
means the same as empty or void, characteristics which imply a need
for corrective measures: That which is empty should be filled.
Perhaps that is why some are all too obliging to fill that void
with what they call progress or development.

A
grassland is vast. It creates the feeling that it is abundant. Its
Sheer volume suggests that there is plenty. Certainly it wouldn't
hurt to use just a little. At the same time its expanse frustrates.
It is too big to take in, to get a grasp of its meaning. It sprawls
before the eyes incomprehensible. It surrounds, cutting off hope of
escape.

A grassland is unsettling. One does not
know what to make of all that space. It lies there untamed,
uncommercial, uncivilized. If man has not mastered it, it might
unleash some unseen danger.

In its blank state,
it may reflect the one who looks. It may stir a sudden awareness of
one's discontent, of the pressure man exerts on the natural order,
of the distance one regularly keeps between oneself and something
greater, be it nature or God. And as one becomes aware of this even
at some subconscious level, the grassland inspires flight, the need
to get away from a possible life-altering awakening.

That is, unless one lingers to experience what
is not obvious, letting in this great expanse that we don't
manipulate or control.

Three of the five
cooperating agencies that have authority over the land and water
that lie in the path of the project realized the problems that the
railroad would create. The Forest Service, the Bureau of Land
Management and the Bureau of Reclamation all recommended that it
not be built. Nonetheless, in its final environmental impact
statement, the Surface Transportation Board approved the route
through the grasslands. As part of its approval the board required
the railroad to meet 147 conditions designed to "mitigate its
impact."

I never heard the word mitigate before
I started following this project two years ago. Initially, I
thought it meant to resolve issues or concerns that individuals or
groups raised. But the word's definition acknowledges that the
intended action will create a situation that cannot be resolved. It
means to cause to become "less harsh or hostile," to make "less
severe or painful."

Building the railroad causes
problems. Mitigation doesn't make them go away. It only lessens
them.

So why build the railroad? Simply put, the
rationale goes like this: Electric companies need coal, people need
electricity, therefore the railroad must be built. For the sake of
providing electricity to populated areas hundreds of miles away,
one fourth of the National Grasslands' 4 million acres will be
transformed into just another avenue to get the goods to market.
The change will sacrifice the subtle wonder of these rare
treasures. And isn't it ironic: These semi-arid lands have returned
to their fragile balance after misguided pre-Dust Bowl attempts to
convert them to croplands.

They've recovered
from the last bad idea. They don't need another.

Ken Steinken is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He teaches English
and journalism at Stevens High School in Rapid City, S. D., and is
working on a book about the railroad's expansion through the
grasslands.